On Friday, Fort Worth-repping rock ’n’ roll band Quaker City Night Hawks are playing a homecoming show at Tulips FTW. It’ll be the band’s first Fort Worth outing since October 2022, when they played a mid-week gig at Fort Brewery during a short break between two halves of a fall tour. In the time between then and now, Quaker City’s approach to being in a band has evolved, and while they’re certain to knock the dust off a lot of fan favorites at Tulips, they’ll debut some new material they’ve never played live, songs that will appear on the upcoming, as-yet-untitled follow-up to 2019’s QCNH LP.
A homecoming concert by one of Fort Worth’s biggest groups — along with Delta Spirit frontman Matthew Logan Vasquez and local favorite Matthew McNeal both opening — is certainly noteworthy, but the way the new songs came about is a part of the band’s reassessment of themselves as both a business and creative partnership, a shift that had been in the making since the pandemic shut the world down in 2020.
For the Quaker City Night Hawks, that calamity caused the cancellations of two tours in the works, first of Europe, then of Australia. And in the intervening years, the band has parted ways with its music industry intermediaries. Major talent agency William Morris dropped them. Their contract with Lightning Rod records ran out, and they chose not to renew it. They’d been managed by Space Colonel Management’s Adam Barnes, whose clients include Americana heavies like Shooter Jennings and Jason Boland, and they ended that agreement, too. The industry players whom QCNH had worked so hard to court and sign with were gone, and for a lot of bands, those sort of departures are enough to make them call it a day.
This didn’t happen for the Quaker City Night Hawks. In fact, ditching the handlers and booking agents and business strangers crowding the panes of endless zoom calls proved to be highly inspirational.
“We’re free and clear of all of that now, so we’re kinda free agents at this point,” said singer-guitarist and co-founder Sam Anderson. He and drummer/producer Jordan Richardson were having drinks in my backyard with me on a recent night, and I could tell this new lease on live shows had juiced their collective creativity.
“It kinda started with us wanting to do it on our own,” Anderson said, “where we’re all gonna be equal partners in this record.”
At present, the album’s recording process is ongoing, and the band isn’t really in a hurry for it to reach a conclusion, in contrast to their previous albums, which were all written with release-date deadlines in mind. “It helps not having a timeline,” Anderson said. “It’s been better on the creative process, because we’re kind of writing as we go, rather than having to get everything polished before we go in because we’re going to be on a clock.”
“It’s more of an ‘exploring’ record,” Richardson said. “We were sort of talking about doing it this way after that last tour in 2022.”
In the midst of that tour, while traveling through the Vail Pass during a snowstorm, the band’s trailer started skidding. In a rather hairy maneuver, they had to pull into the emergency turnoff, and as the snow fell and piled, they had to make a decision.
Photo by TC Fleming.
“We were on the Continental Divide,” Anderson recalled. “We were like, ‘We can stop here, or we can keep on going and see what happens.’ ”
Prior to that moment, Richardson said, their shows had been “on fire.” What they’d planned to do was hit the studio as soon as they got home and track some new stuff live to capture the energy they’d been burning on Midwestern stages the previous two weeks. Yet there they were on the side of the road overlooking the side of a mountain plunging beneath them, contemplating whether or not to give into the weather and head home early. They would have had to cancel almost a dozen shows that lay on the other side, a move that would surely have blunted the momentum they’d been riding into the West. So, they pressed on. The shows turned out to be great, but in Richardson’s words, “Different stuff happened,” and the recording sessions lost their urgency. “But the fact that everything about the timeline ended up stretched … [is] reflected in the songs. They feel weirder and cooler because we’ve been able to experiment with them.”
Along with an open-ended timeline, the band’s writing habits have expanded. In the past, Quaker City’s songs came from Anderson and singer-guitarist/co-founder David Matsler, a friend he made 20 years ago in Lubbock during a brief stint at Texas Tech. These days, Anderson said, “it’s been a lot more equally collaborative process than before. … At least for me, it takes a lot of pressure off knowing that [bassist Max Smith] has a good idea for a part or [Richardson] has something cool for this other part. Not having to worry about who gets what [credit] also relieves a lot of stress. It’s just four-part equal songwriters.”
As to what these new songs sound like, the band hasn’t exactly abandoned their Southern rock roots. Since Day 1, Quaker City’s sound has been routinely described as “Texas boogie,” and excising that would be possible only if the band could travel back in time. But they’ve been heading for the cosmos of psychedelic rock since their 2016 album El Astronauta. I’ve heard a rough mix of a song tentatively called “Kingdom,” and it sounds like if Thee OH Sees came from Whataburger Country instead of the Land of In-N-Out. It’s pretty far removed from the bluesy roots-rock that gained QCNH a solid foothold in the Texas country scene of the late 2000s and 2010s. Playing songs that sound like they have a krautrock influence might alienate some of their oldest fans, but Anderson doesn’t think his band’s shifts in musical direction have ever come out of nowhere.
“I feel like we’ve always cast a pretty wide net, in terms of influences and our sound,” he said. “It’s just that the team we had always had to put a ‘package’ together. They were most familiar with Americana and the [associated] scene, trying to shoehorn us in there because we had hats on. And there’s never really been a genre we’ve felt comfortable in, scene-wise. We got put with a lot of Texas Country and Red Dirt when we first started. Then we played a lot with Americana bands.”
“Meanwhile,” Richardson said, “every time [we go] to the Pacific Northwest, all of those people from that, like, more stoner-y side of things were all over us. It’s almost like a geographical thing.”
Two new songs “in the can,” Anderson said — “Kingdom” and the mid-tempo chill-out jam “Haltom City Vice” — are “vastly different, but they’re not outside of what we’ve normally done. They’re just both ends of the spectrum of what we’ve done. The thing I’ve always loved about this band is if the song’s good, we put it out, regardless of whatever genre people think it falls in. … Does the song sound like something you’d roll the windows down and smoke a joint to? Or does it sound like something you listen to while you’re getting ready to work out? It might be both. I don’t know.”
On Friday night at Tulips, the Quaker City Night Hawks will pose that question for their fans when they play the new stuff live. Maybe some of those folks will peel off in favor of their favorite QCNH songs from a decade ago, but for those who’ve grown up listening to these guys, their latest sonic ideas will keep those fans coming back for more.
Quaker City Night Hawks
8pm Fri w/Matthew Logan Vasquez and Matthew McNeal at Tulips FTW, 112 St. Louis Av, FW. $20-75. 817-367-9798.
